Hotel Sport Postojna

5/8/09

Before we went to this very famous cave - the only one in the world with a little train inside - we did shopping!!!!!!! We had no breakfast as we have no more food in the truck so we are very hungry, not the best way to do the shopping. Lidl welcomes us with its known colours and lets buy all! Slovenia is actually very cheap (incl.alcohol) so we buy a lot. Vegetable, sweets ...

One of Slovenia's biggest attractions, a really big, touristy cave worth the trip. A little train ride takes you a couple of kilometers into the mountain and then a guided walk takes you around for about an hour. Impressive, cold...and cool!

Very hard to take ...

... and expensive, but easy to access. At the Ljubuljana train station, I asked about the way to get there both at the railway office and the TI office. While the lady in the railway office was not helpful, the lady in the TI office was very kind to give me a bus timetable printed out. Because I had a Eurail Pass, I took a train, but I was glad to get trnsportation information at the TI.

From the Postojna train station, I had to walk 30 ...

... time later in normal clothes. Don't know where the dog went. A group of Italians came in - maybe 30 of them - and ordered cocktails and coffees which kept the single waitress busy for a while. While she wasn't looking a group of three men who had been sitting at a table for some time and had consumed at least two drinks each - martinis - snuck out without paying. When the waitress realised she tore out after them but they had gone. She was in a foul mood after that. Around 11.30 we ...

... her we met there and after some short sightseeing tour we went to a pub to get a beer. Once again I had my opinions about the place changed when talking to a local (even though she was not originally from Slovenia she'd been living there for some years already). It's amazing how enriching it's to meet someone who lives in the place you are visiting. They always have different views of things compared to tourists you meet on the hostels. Day 23 As Yahoo! weather ...

... loved traveling with American tourists because they were much "happier" travelers than the more dour Romanians. In these and other ways, travelers cope with the tension of the inevitable glitches with levity - getting a bit "punchy" but staying loose at the same time among caring family (fellow travelers become as intimate as family in many ways, but not intimate enough that you not quite likely to let yourself completely lose your composure in a fit of pique ...

... along the way for turning where I wasn't allowed to (luckily they were nice and let me off with a warning when I promised this would be my only day driving in Slovenia), and we were at the caves. Postojna caves is touristy, complete with a ride inside and hundreds of school kids on field trip but it was totally worth it! A little train ride took us into the caves and down to the good stuff where we got off and walked around for a km or two ...

... to pay to climb the tower, we found a small gallery showing some of the work done to the castle. In 1899 a Ljubljana nobleman put forward the idea of building a funicular railway from the city to the castle, which was finally realised in the late 20th century. A photo exhibition was on display, showing copies of the original letters and photos of workmen digging holes and helicopters lowering steel beams onto the hillside. It was as if the exhibition was trying ...

According to my original plan my next stop should have been somewhere up in Austria but the thought of spending the last part of my trip wandering through museums with hordes of tourists just didn't appeal to me so I decided that I would spend some time going through central Europe. Stop number one is ljubljana which is the capital of Slovenia and only has around 280000 people living here, so is relatively small by world standards. This place sought of reminds me of ...